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Big drop in monthly prices

When we launched Campaign Monitor 8 years ago, we started with the simplest pricing in the industry. Just one cent for each recipient plus a $5 delivery fee. This was great for those that didn't send all that often, but not so good for our customers who send a lot of email. So in late 2010, we introduced monthly pricing, where you can send a lot more emails for a low monthly price.

I'm very proud of the fact that in the eight years since we launched, we've never raised these prices. And today, we're doing just the opposite.

Every tier just got cheaper

We've lowered the price for every single tier, and added two new tiers to help drive our prices even lower. Here's a quick overview of the changes:

Two new tiers

We've seen a lot of requests from customers who had trouble justifying the price increase from $100/month to $250/month when their list grew past 10,000 subscribers. The last thing we want to do is discourage you from growing your audience, so we've split up the old 10,000 to 25,000 tier into two new tiers.

If you have between 10,000 and 15,000 subscribers, your monthly price just dropped $121 on the spot. If you have between 15,000 and 25,000 subscribers, you'll also save more than $50/month.

A quick FAQ for our resellers

If you have clients that are paying for their own campaigns, you'll be pleased to know we put a lot of thought into how these price reductions will impact these clients.

I'm marking up my clients prices, how does this impact them?

In a nutshell, it won't. We've kept the prices your clients are paying exactly as they were, only now you're automatically earning more profit. You can decide if you want to pass on the saving to your clients, or enjoy a healthier margin.

I'm not marking up clients, how does it impact them?

If you're not marking a client up, they'll automatically get access to the new lower prices from their next charge onwards. Alternatively, you could jump in and mark their prices up to what they used to pay, and earn a profit automatically. It's your call, but by default they'll be paying less from now on.

A change to send limits

On top of the lower monthly prices, we've made another change that may impact a small number of customers. Previously all our monthly tiers below 50,000 subscribers didn't have a send limit. A send limit basically puts a cap on how many emails you can send each month before we bump you up to the next tier. With the new lower prices and the introduction of our new unlimited plan, all our basic monthly plans now have a monthly send limit that's 5 times the maximum number of subscribers for that tier. This means you can still send 5 or 6 campaigns each month for no additional cost.

Only a small number of customers on our low volume tiers typically send more than 5 or 6 emails each month, so this change will largely go unnoticed. Having said that, we've been sure to grandfather all our current customers who historically send lots of emails each month, so they will continue to have no send limit.

Introducing the Unlimited Plan

On top of these big price reductions, we also just launched a completely new type of monthly plan for our customers that send a lot of email. The Unlimited Plan is just that, unlimited emails every month all for a low fixed price, with plans starting at just $29/month.

This means that if you send 10,000 or 10 million emails in a given month, you'll pay the same low price. It covers regular campaigns, autoresponders, recurring RSS to email campaigns, one off emails triggered via our API. Everything we offer is included and unlimited. On top of this, all customers on our unlimited plans get free design and spam testing too. Run as many tests as you like and don't pay us a cent extra.

We've been trialling a number of high volume customers on this plan for the last few months, and it's been super popular. We can't wait to see how it goes now that it's available to everyone. I'll be sharing more details about the new plan in a follow up post shortly. In the mean time, enjoy the new prices.

24 Comments

This is finally great to see, now finally we can start compete on certain packages.

However I would like to see you add another tier or two at the lower end 501-1500 = $15 or even 501-1000 = $15 instead of forcing someone up from $9 to $29 if they slowly gain more people on their list (looks to be your sweet spot for earning if I’m reading between the lines), it’s a bit unfair at the lower end don’t you think?

Thanks for the feedback Pharoah, great to hear these changes are going to make things easier for you. The tweaks we made were based on lots of customer feedback since we launched monthly pricing a couple of years ago. We’re pretty happy with the tiers right now, but as usual, nothing is set in stone and I appreciate the feedback. We’re always listening.

Correct me if I am wrong but I thought that the previous “pay per month” service was unlimited? EX: 501 - 2500 send level was $30 (agency cost) before. Now it’s $59 to send 501 - 2500 unlimited - am I misreading this?

Brent
28th August

Yeah, Bill, this is a big price increase, not a drop!! Most of my customers are in the <2,500 category so if I thought it was difficult to compete against the unlimited plans before it just got even worse.

Hey there Bill and Brent, if your client accounts have already been sending in excess of the new send limits, they have been grandfathered in automatically and will continue to have no send limit. That said, we understand that there may be concerns about applying our pricing to new clients, which is part of the reason why we’ve now lowered the entry price to make these plans more accessible. In addition, we’ve included unlimited design and spam tests to the Unlimited plans, to make the step up better value for money for more frequent senders.

If you would like to discuss what’s the best pricing option for new clients, by all means get in touch with our team. We’d like to offer our resellers in particular a good deal, so any feedback would be much appreciated.

I don’t know very many people at the lower end who used the design and spam tests as they couldn’t afford enough to get customised templates made anyway and charging $20 more on the basic account for something people already had (unlimited emails) and something never really used (design and spam) is way too much.

I think you really should have done a poll to your user base about the new pricing as I think you would have found the majority aren’t going to be that chuffed or better off with the changes once they really analyse what’s happened.

Yes you have reduced prices and made a big deal about it, but what you’ve given with one hand you’ve taken away with the other. There is no real balancing to what you have done here.

It’s clear you’ve kept your sweet spot by only reducing it by $1, now if you had added a tier below that then I would be a little more forgiving, but clearly this setup gets people in (reduced entry as you say) then basically punishes them for slowly building a list beyond 500 subscribers, I mean $20 a month for 501, 502, 503… do you really think that’s fair?

You’ve also taken away a strong selling point, unlimited sends, which you admit never got used that much so surely wouldn’t matter to actually keep it if it meant we had one more sales plus in our columns.

The more I look at this the more I see how unbalanced it is and if someone else releases a decent balanced cost white label system then you will probably lose quite a number of customers and quickly. Loyalty only goes so far in today’s world when you can take your list with you

Don’t forget also that many companies are getting more and more tech savy to do this sort of stuff in house. I know, I’ve already lose two clients setting up their own campaign monitor system afteron of them had theirIT guy do a review online and noticed it was talking about the same system we sold them.

Suffice to say that client is now lost as they “feel” we were dishonest with them and they can save more money per month, great for you bad for me.

Oh and I’ve lost 4 customers just in the last month to Mailchimp because of their 2000 free list, some customers don’t care about the label in the email, they do care about not having to spend out $30 each month in this economic climate.

Hi Alan, thanks for the feedback there. Firstly, I wanted to assure you that we did consult a huge number of customers about these changes, as well as have a very close look at the numbers. Rest assured that almost every customer we have paying us monthly is better off after these changes.

We also have a number of other changes planned in the coming months that will help alleviate some of your other concerns in regards to reselling.

If you’d like to know more about these, I’d be happy to share with you via email. Drop us a line and I can fill you in on where we’re going. I think you’re going to like what we’ve got in store. And again, thanks for the thoughtful feedback. Positive or negative, we’re always listening.

Bulk credit buying should come way, way down. Their purchasers must comprise a significant portion of your volume and repeat business—the credits are significantly more expensive than the individual plans.

Resellers not knowing about these changes in advance is a big oversight from CM, existing clients (who don’t send big volumes) and those who have been quoted will need to be advised that their plans have changed, some will be better off, but having a cap is the loss of a major USP and I think will result in less use from some.
A big disappointment ...

I’m very shocked that you would let private information pertaining to my business and the types of accounts I have be put on such a public forum. What if I still had my old site up and my client list, you effectively would have handed over an opportunity to my competitors to try to steal my clients, knowing what packages they were roughly on.

You are just lucky that the account you refer to is an old one and since you don’t allow transferring of account one I have to keep open just in case.

You thought you would try to call me on what I was saying by highlighting that I don’t have pay monthly accounts and publicly trying to shame me, well shame on you, it’s backfired.

I am very very disappointed right now in Campaign Monitor and the fact that this was allowed, I take my privacy online very seriously, clearly you don’t.

I also agree with others you really should give the people making you money a better heads up of such big changes. No point telling us once it’s been decided and implemented with very little time to react.

You do know we have marketing material we create to sell this and adwords and…so on, what if someone just went to print with an ad costing thousands of pounds and now can’t give unlimited mailings for the normal monthly fee.

Did you even consider these potential issues??

I could go on but I’m still seething at the private date issue, I honestly can’t believe you went there and did that…

P.S my first reply to this situation strangely disappeared upon my next refresh, this one had better not.

Thanks for the apology, however to be honest I still don’t see what right you had to go snooping into one of my accounts in the first place, It’s not like I was asking for help with a technical issue.

FYI you would have got the same shock response on here anyway with an email reply, if not worse, as the same privacy issue was broken, you just happened to make it public by doing it on here.

I would highly suggest you call a meeting to review your business ethics/practices and look at your privacy policies, because my trust is certainly broken right now.

I never received that email from you (yes I checked the spam folder), so I’ve use a different email on this comment, please send it to that.

Sol
30th August

First of all - it’s good to see CM looking at pricing - a long time coming.
Sorry to say I moved to MC for most of my clients these days, though I still love CM and do still use it for some - the new pricing may tempt me back!

Secondly, I would like to see a monthly charge for agencies that covers tiers across all of our accounts - is that available / possible?

Thirdly, I was concerned to see Alan’s details published like that. Although I can see David was trying to be helpful, I have to agree with Alan that it was a bad call, potentially damaging for him and also a bit of an invasion of privacy. You could do more than apologise and actually remove the original comment?

Whilst the new pricing has been a welcome surprise given the repeated message in all the other discussions of the quality of features over price, it barely matches where the competitors are. I’m sure they are on the verge of reducing their prices a little more or will add even more features, like mail Chimp hinting at a white label system.

It’s going to get very very competitive out there, I wonder if any company has patented their own version of “rounded corners” - FYI Apple users (like me), chill, I know it wasn’t about that ;-)

I still think that them ignoring the lower end and forcing smaller list owners to have to fork out $20 more for going from 500 to 501 is a complete slap in the face given all the other changes and amounts they made.

Thank you for your concern and support with regards to my invasion of privacy.

As for my data like I said it was an old account so to be honest I would rather they keep it up there so people can read the full thread and comment (like you have) on what’s actually there. It won’t harm me in any way thankfully, but I do feel it needs some serious attention as it’s a major breach of trust.

Brett
30th August

As a long (long) time CampaignMonitor user (on the pay-per-campaign pricing), the lowered prices for monthly plans is definitely a good step for us (especially as we’re in the 10,000-15,000 range). It might push us over from pay-per-campaign to monthly, actually.

It’s really interesting to me to see the parallels between this blog post and the experiences my company (a SaaS, like CM) had after recently announcing a price change. Like David implies, our changes were extremely well received in private comments by email and on a large user survey. The blog comments, however, were far more critical. I wonder if that’s common.

Also, as a SaaS provider, it’s understandable (to me) to split the unlimited users off to a separate tier. I don’t think most people realize just how significant a resource hog the small $9 or $15/mo users can be. There comes a point where the unlimited users _easily_ start to push resource usage beyond any sort of financial justification. In our case, we were adding serious and costly infrastructure improvements that simply weren’t sustainable without pushing the heavy “unlimited” users to more expensive plans.

Oh, Alan, fwiw, I made a comment earlier today and it showed up then disappeared on pageload, like you described. I emailed CM about it since (paired with your experience) it seems like a bug. They confirmed that they didn’t have a record of my first comment. Just fwiw.

I was really excited when I saw the title of this post, as I’ve already had one of my biggest clients leave because of the pricing being too high (which also hurts my relationship with them, as they don’t feel I’m looking out for their best interests). However, my hopes are lost and I have a very bitter taste in my mouth regarding CM. This post is very misleading and feels downright dishonest. This isn’t a big drop in monthly prices. You’ve completely changed the product being offered—we are not getting the same product for a cheaper price, rather this is a different product altogether. Had we gotten the unlimited plan (that we already had before) for this new price, it’d make sense to say this was a big drop in prices.

Exactly! I agree with the others too. This is more of a price increase. If we compare the pricing between CM and MC, even the basic plan of CM is still much more expensive than MC’s for the same tiers, even though MC offers unlimited sends for that price.

So effectively CM just became even more expensive for us resellers. We just lost our USP of unlimited sends too. This is really bad.

If MC comes up with a white label system, CM’s white label system will be toast. In fact even MC’s resellers will be able to compete with CM directly at pricing.

This comparison shows how ridiculous the new pricing system is now. And the huge price jump between $10 to $29 is just absurd. I hope you guys seriously reconsider your pricing (a $10 price drop for each tier would make a lot more sense and maybe adding another tier bw 500 & 2500).

Also please email me the upcoming changes you have in store. This will really affect my decision of joining CM’s white label program.

Hey there, sorry for the delay in response over the long weekend. Just to follow up, Dave has been responding to many of our customers personally, including those in these comments. As he mentioned, both good and bad feedback is appreciated, either here or one-to-one with our team.

We realize that we probably did let on a few too many details earlier. We were trying to be helpful and overshared no doubt. I made the call to remove these details, as it’s evident what we did wrong from reading the thread, yet it’s still not right to have customer information like this on display.

And yes, we’ve been having teething problems with our updated CMS - comments have disappeared in the past and we’re working to get this resolved. We’re really sorry, everyone.

Phillip & Utkarsh - It’s true, we should have done more to inform resellers in advance about these changes. That is most certainly a lesson learnt. In the future, we will be more proactive about this.

We’re keen to discuss how these changes will affect new and existing clients on a case by case basis, so I invite you to get in touch with our team so we can take a look at your circumstances and make recommendations in confidence. We’re sorry that the transition to our new pricing hasn’t been entirely smooth, but we’re committed to helping everyone through it.

Taking out the information I specifically said should be left in so others can form their own opinion with just strikes me of you covering up what you initially did wrong. Other people can now only guess at what was released instead of having the facts. It was my information so surely that counts for something. I would much rather you put the comment back in please.

The issue that was left out in your reply is that you didn’t just change prices, that would have been fine, you completely changed the service offering.

That has WAY more impact to all of us than a price change. Prices simply means we make a little more money in most cases (and I’m still not happy at the price jump from 500 to 501 of $20 - you need a tier in between for us to compete with other competitors).

A service offering change means we have sales pitches, websites and marketing material that needs to be changed, we lose a vital USP (unlimited sending), which used much or not (by the sounds of it not anyway) is still a good selling point lost.

It also complicates our selling as now we have to distinguish between more things so it’s not as easy to sell.

It’s great that you’re looking to make this better in the future by informing us sooner, but the point is that between now and then a lot of us are affected a lot by this and makes us less competitive in other ways.

So please stop just talking about prices there is a lot more than that going on here.

[QUOTE Ros Hodgekiss]
We’re keen to discuss how these changes will affect new and existing clients on a case by case basis, so I invite you to get in touch with our team so we can take a look at your circumstances and make recommendations in confidence. We’re sorry that the transition to our new pricing hasn’t been entirely smooth, but we’re committed to helping everyone through it.

And on my other post (https://www.campaignmonitor.com/forums/post/25890/#p25890) regarding new pricing tiers, after days of “sorries” and your recommendation to get in touch with your customer support to discuss my cases.. what was the ONLY “help” you could offer by replying to my email?
-> I invite you to review our Terms of Use in regards to reselling our product.

(Oh, by the way.. i am still wondering why my last comment of that post (commenting on your business) suddenly disapeared.)

Well, if this sounds like a “helping hand” to your partners, it does not to me.
I am finally happy to see that we are not alone with complaints, but definitely left alone by CM as partner.

[QUOTE Ros Hodgekiss]
It’s true, we should have done more to inform resellers in advance about these changes. That is most certainly a lesson learnt

What lesson exactly did you learned?
There is NOTHING from your side which shows ‘partner’ loyalty, except some good words like ‘thank you for your comments’ & ‘sorry’

Hi Alex, thanks for writing in, both here, on the forums and via email. In regards to this unusual situation you had with your client, I’d like to mention that we updated our app in the following weeks, based on your feedback alone. I feel it’s a little unfair to say our team did nothing, when we discussed your circumstances and explicitly changed how invite emails are sent from the app.

In my earlier email to you (which you’ve quoted here), I wanted to make it clear that we do have the right to change our price schedule. It’s important that resellers do understand our terms of use prior to reselling, including the possibility that aspects of our service are bound to change from time to time.

Many businesses that rely on real-world goods and services observe price changes on a daily basis. The price of gas fluctuates, as do exchange rates. These businesses inevitably develop tolerances for price changes and anticipate them well into the future.

Likewise, the price of digital goods and services can change from time to time, too. But unlike, say, an unexpected spike in gas prices, we carefully transitioned to a new price schedule that benefits the vast majority of customers on monthly plans. It wasn’t a perfect transition, but given the positive feedback that we’ve received both publicly and privately, we feel that we’ve made the right decisions here.